Resident involvement and empowerment

Consultation- regulatory requirements

Social housing landlords are required to ensure that residents are given a wide range of opportunities to influence and be involved in:

• the formulation of their landlord’s housing-related policies and strategic priorities
• the making of decisions about how housing-related services are delivered, including the setting of service standards
• the scrutiny of their landlord’s performance and the making of recommendations to their landlord about how performance might be improved
• the management of their homes, where applicable
• the management of repair and maintenance services, such as commissioning and undertaking a range of repair tasks, as agreed with landlords, and the sharing in savings made, and
• agreeing local offers for service delivery

In addition to these outcomes; social housing landlords are expected to support their residents to develop and implement opportunities for involvement and empowerment, including by:

• supporting them to exercise their Right to Manage or otherwise exercise housing management functions, where appropriate
• supporting the formation and activities of Resident Panels or equivalent groups and responding in a constructive and timely manner to them
• the provision of timely and relevant performance information to support effective scrutiny by residents of their landlord’s performance in a form which the landlord seeks to agree with their residents
• providing support to residents to build their capacity to be more effectively involved

Resident associations

A Resident Association is a group of people who live in a neighbourhood, and decide that they want to get together to deal with issues that affect their local community. The group can include tenants, shared owners, leaseholders and homeowners.

Resident Associations set up with a set of simple rules, usually known as a constitution which sets out the aims of the group and how it will work towards achieving those aims. The constitution will cover at least the following key issues:

• membership – which should be open to all residents in the defined area which the group is representing
• voting – all members will have an equal vote
• representation – all members should actively seek to represent the various needs of the area and must not discriminate on the grounds of nationality, political opinion, race, religious opinion, gender, age, sexuality, disability or any other basis
• conduct – members should at all times conduct themselves in a reasonable manner when attending meetings

Your landlord will have examples of ‘model’ constitutions.

Groups of residents might start an Resident Association for a variety of reasons, including:

• campaigning for something positive (e.g. a better play area)
• campaigning against something or to get services improved
• giving their community a greater voice than it would have as a collection of individuals
• creating a better sense of community and belonging
• organising social activities or to get involved in local events
• keeping residents informed of what’s happening in the local area neighbourhood
• taking positive action to tackle problems to improve the local area you

Resident consultation

Consultation is any activity that gives residents a voice and an opportunity to influence important decisions. Some consultation is statutory (your landlord must do it) and some is non-statutory. There are various methods that landlords use to consult with their residents; some of these are shown in the table below.

Resident panels - decision making

Effective Resident Panels involved in decision-making usually need to:

• be about partnership working with the landlord
• have a means of being accountable back to the wider resident constituency
• have routes by which they can influence decision-making and services
• be about practical issues that matter to residents.

The wide array of Resident Panels involved in decision-making makes them difficult to define. The brief descriptions below give some impression of the diversity that exists.

Co-governance: Some Resident Panels involved in decision- making have been defined to have a specific involvement in governance (in some cases in the landlord’s rules). They could be described as “co-governance” panels, working alongside housing association or ALMO Boards or the Council’s cabinet.

Joint management: Others involve residents as part of a body that also includes other members, such as senior staff, Portfolio Holders for housing or other councillors.

Resident management and control: Resident controlled housing organisations (e.g. co-operatives and tenant management organisations) are examples of Resident Panels who manage and/or own their homes.

Advisory panels: Whilst not formally part of the governance structure, some panels have been set up to perform similar functions with direct relationships with Boards and senior staff.

Residents federations: Residents federations are a long-standing means by which residents have been represented. Usually independent of the landlord, they have had various relationships with landlords and operate in different ways.

Area and specific panels: Larger landlords often have area based Resident Panels that operate locally. Some housing associations formed as a result of mergers have Resident Panels set up in different parts of group structures. Some Resident Panels have been set up to consider particular service areas, such as communications, major repairs, resident involvement, diversity, and many others. Some Resident Panels have been set up to represent particular demographic groups in relation to landlord’s Residents.

Resident panels – monitoring and scrutiny

This function is carried out in many different ways in landlords. Governing bodies (Boards of housing associations and ALMOs and Cabinets in local authorities) scrutinise the way their staff implement policies. Sub-committees scrutinise particular aspects of services. Various groups scrutinise performance information. External and internal auditors independently scrutinise particular activities (most notably the landlord’s accounts). Resident Panels can be involved in many of these activities.

Effective resident scrutiny is driven by:

• independence from landlord governance
• there must be accountability, openness and transparency
• it must integrate with the strategic and performance management frameworks of a landlord
• there must be clear responsibilities that are agreed from the beginning
• there must be a capacity to deliver against expectations
• decisions must be made freely and based on access to a range of information from different commissioned sources
• an ability to shape the parameters of the information the landlord collects
• embedding resident scrutiny into formal performance, operation and assessment frameworks
• raising the profile of scrutiny and making as many residents aware as possible of what it is and how to get involved
• an effective approach to deciding what areas are scrutinised and what evidence will inform decisions
• establishing an appropriate recruitment process and systems for managing conflicts of interest
• agreeing scrutiny report formats and processes for conveying recommendations to the Governing Body

Resident panels – shaping services

Most landlords have panels that have been set up to enable residents to be involved in reviewing particular services. These may be permanent or temporary task and finish groups. Effective systems to review services might include:

• a systematic plan to review frontline services so that residents are clear when particular elements of the service will be reviewed
• leadership of the review by a team including residents, staff and possibly governing body members
• gathering evidence that feeds into the review (such as survey data, evidence of dissatisfaction, focus groups, the use of resident sounding boards, resident inspection and mystery shopping reports, performance data, benchmark information and information on best practice used elsewhere)
• collating this evidence in a resident friendly fashion to enable residents to challenge emerging conclusions and to enable informed debate between members of the review team
• changes to policies, procedures and systems that are then fed back to residents to show how their input made a difference.

Right to Manage

Local authority residents have had a statutory Right to Manage since 1994. By forming a Tenant Management Organisation, and following Right to Manage Regulations, such residents can take over responsibility for managing housing services from their landlord.

The key stages in the Right to Manage process are as follows:

• the local authority residents explore options for managing services, engage residents and decide that tenant management is the right option for them (although not part of the statutory Right to Manage process this stage is recommended)
• a vote is held which authorises the Tenant Management Organisation to serve a Right to Manage proposal notice on the local authority;
• the Tenant Management Organisation and local authority develop proposals for the services to be managed and budgets to be transferred, drawing on the authority’s support;
• the competence of the Tenant Management Organisation is assessed by an independent approved assessor;
• providing the group is deemed competent, affected residents are balloted to confirm community support, ahead of detailed work by the Tenant Management Organisation and local authority to finalise arrangements for transfer;
• an agreement is prepared and signed transferring management responsibility to the Tenant Management Organisation.

Right to Transfer

These Right to Transfer Regulations require that local authorities co-operate with a group of its residents who wish to explore the benefits of a change of landlord. Where a transfer is shown to be the preferred and option and is viable, the Right to Transfer Regulations compel the local authority to commence the process of transferring ownership of those homes to a private registered provider of social housing.

Any such transfer proposal is subject to existing legislation on stock transfers meaning that the transfer can only go ahead if a majority of secure and introductory tenants of the homes in question vote in favour in a ballot organised by the local authority and the Secretary of State has granted consent.

The Right to Transfer Regulations also allow the local authority to, at any time, request the Secretary of State to halt the proposal if it would have a significant detrimental effect on the local authority’s ability to deliver its housing services or regeneration within the local area.